Lincoln, almost one year on

One of the most difficult things about running a horse charity is that at some point, you’ll be asked to make life and death decisions. Which horse do you save? Which horse do you pass over? 

When faced with requests to save a horse that is on death row, we take every situation very seriously and always do our best, even if that means all we can do is to post the information on our website and facebook page and hope someone else picks the horse up. 

Every horse we hear about lodges itself into our psyche we continue to think about it for weeks and months and maybe years afterwards… always wondering. What happened? 

The next difficult question that we have to deal with is how much money will we, or can we, invest into a horse? If we have one horse that needs thousands of dollars to rehabilitate, aren’t we taking money away from other horses in need? Is it fair? Does one horse’s right to a new life outweigh the rights of many others? 

Ultimately, the question is: how much is a life worth? 

We realised very early on that we couldn’t play the numbers game. That is, it’s not necessarily ‘better’ to save one hundred horses than it is to save ten. Why? Because there are too many horses in Australia. No matter how many we save, there are hundreds of thousands more waiting to take their place at the slaughterhouse. Since we can’t beat the numbers (quantity), we had to make sure that the horses we could save received the very best (quality) in order to improve their lives. 

I used to be a teacher. And at one point, we had several new students come to the school. These students had special needs and were being integrated into mainstream schooling. The school was required to make many modifications to buildings, costing many thousands of dollars. Many parents and teachers were upset by this, saying that it was unfair. It was then that I heard a new definition of equality: “Equality does not mean that every person is treated the same. Equality means that every person receives whatever they need in order to have the same opportunities in life.” 

At Charlie’s Angels, we’ve adopted this definition. Is it fair to spend thousands of dollars rehabilitating one horse? Yes, if it means that horse gets whatever it needs in order to have the same opportunity to find its loving forever home. How much is a life worth? Whatever it takes.

It is not up to us to place judgement on a horse that is in a world of emotional and psychological pain and say that it isn’t “worth” spending the money to rehabilitate it. All life is valuable. All life is equal. And we will fight to the very end to make sure that the horses that are lucky enough to come into our care receive whatever they need in order to go back out into the world, stronger, wiser, healthier and healed. It’s the best we can do.